The Promenade with the Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil

The Promenade with the Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil is a summer river scene Claude Monet painted in 1874 at Argenteuil. On a grassy bank in the foreground a woman with a parasol and a small child stand above the Seine, and behind them the railway bridge runs across the river under a cloudy sky. The painting is in the Saint Louis Art Museum.

What you are looking at

The foreground is a slope of long, bright green grass, painted in quick, upward strokes, with a dark, rounded bush at left and smaller clumps of weeds and flowers at the water's edge on the right. Standing in the grass at right center is a woman in a pale gray-white dress with a dark band at the hem, holding a cream-colored parasol tilted over her shoulder, her face shaded. Further left, small and half-hidden by the grass, stands a child in a dark coat and straw hat. They are generally taken to be Camille and Jean Monet, although the figures are too sketchy to be portraits.

Behind them the river spreads wide and silver, reflecting the sky in soft grays and blues. A small rowing boat with two figures sits on the water near the center. Across the whole width of the picture, a little above the middle, runs the railway bridge: a long, flat, gray deck on pairs of pale piers, seen side-on and quite far away, so that it reads as a horizontal line ruled across the landscape. Beyond it lies the far bank with a church spire and trees. The bridge divides the picture neatly in two: the lively, sunlit near bank below and the calm, distant world of sky and water above. The sky takes up the top half, a field of white and gray clouds with patches of blue, painted in light, curling strokes. The signature is at lower left.

Where and when it was painted

In 1874, the year of the first Impressionist exhibition, Monet was living at Argenteuil and painting the river constantly, often from a floating studio boat. That summer Renoir and Manet came to paint with him there. The railway bridge, rebuilt after the Franco-Prussian War, appears in several of his pictures from 1873–74; the town and its motifs are on our Argenteuil hub.

How it was painted

The handling is light and rapid, typical of Monet's work at the height of the Argenteuil years. The grass is built from separate dashes of yellow-green and darker green, the sky from loose, thin strokes over a pale ground, and the figures from a few touches each. The bridge, by contrast, is drawn in crisp, straight lines, a man-made geometry set against soft natural forms. The palette is cool and silvery, suggesting a hazy or lightly overcast summer day.

The railway bridge and how this version differs

Monet's other bridge pictures make the structure the hero. In Railroad Bridge, Argenteuil in Philadelphia and The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil in the Orsay, the bridge cuts diagonally across the canvas, with a train on it. Here it is pushed into the middle distance and becomes part of the scenery behind a quiet Sunday walk. The woman with a parasol on a grassy slope looks forward to Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son of 1875, and to the walkers in The Artist's House at Argenteuil. Together these pictures show how naturally Monet combined modern engineering and leisure in one landscape.

Ownership and where to see it

Its recorded owners include the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche and the couturier Edward Molyneux. The St. Louis collector Sydney M. Shoenberg acquired it in 1953, and it entered the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1973 (45:1973), where it is shown with the museum's other French paintings. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings.